Posted!

Join the Conversation

Comments

Welcome to our new and improved comments, which are for subscribers only.
This is a test to see whether we can improve the experience for you.
You do not need a Facebook profile to participate.

You will need to register before adding a comment.
Typed comments will be lost if you are not logged in.

Please be polite.
It's OK to disagree with someone's ideas, but personal attacks, insults, threats, hate speech, advocating violence and other violations can result in a ban.
If you see comments in violation of our community guidelines, please report them.

Every Election Day for the past few years, Margaret Corbin has complained about her polling site in Irondequoit to anyone who’ll listen. The trouble, as she sees it, is no one is listening.

“No one thinks it’s a problem except me,” Corbin said.

What Corbin would like addressed is the message etched in a marble monument that sits a dozen or so paces from the entrance to where she casts her vote in the parish center of the former St. Thomas the Apostle Church.

The message reads, “In Memory of the Unborn,” and is followed by a verse from the Bible’s Book of Isaiah that asks, “Can a mother be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Even should she forget I will never forget you.” A “Pray for the Unborn” sticker is wrapped around a nearby lamppost.

The language, Corbin believes, carries political overtones that have no place in such proximity to a polling site.

“I feel the language is one of the top political issues in our society at the moment, the idea that anything that has to do with women’s bodies is up for discussion,” Corbin said. “If I was running this thing, I would say, ‘Let’s put a canvas over it.’”

The reason her complaints have gone unaddressed, if not unheard, by elections and town officials, who work in conjunction to designate polling sites, is because nothing about the message violates New York’s electioneering law.

The law prohibits “electioneering within the polling place, or in any public street, within a 100-foot radial” of the entrance of the polling site, and says, “No political banner, button, poster or placard shall be allowed in or upon the police place or within the such 100-foot radial.”

A spate of complaints in 2014 about a pro-life monument at a Florida church that had housed a polling site for 45 years resulted in the church refusing to host voters again. Local elections board officials there held firm the church didn't break any laws.

Local elections board officials in New York recently received an email from executives at the state Board of Elections reminding them of what constitutes “electioneering,” which New York defines as the issuing of statements or literature for or against a candidate or referendum on the ballot.

The email also referenced a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down a Minnesota law that prohibited voters from wearing T-shirts, hats and buttons expressing political views at polling places.

“Persons wearing clothing or donning buttons that include political viewpoints — i.e. support of the Second Amendment, Marriage Equality, Environmental Sustainability, Immigration Reform, Support for Voter ID Laws — do not violate New York’s prohibition unless the issue itself is unambiguously on the ballot in the form of a ballot proposal,” wrote Robert Brehm and Todd Valentine, the co-executive directors of the state BOE.

Brehm and Valentine went on to write that the ban on banners, buttons and posters “applies only in the narrow context of the prohibition” on electioneering. “That is to say, to constitute a violation of New York law a banner, button, poster or placard must constitute ‘electioneering,’” they wrote.

“New York’s anti-electioneering law was intended to prevent the political campaigns from intruding into the polling place,” their concluded. “It was not designed to prohibit political expression generally.”

It’s mind-boggling that 45 years after Roe v. Wade established a constitutional right to abortion there remain factions still committed to eroding a woman’s right to choose one.

But President Donald Trump’s promise to nominate only Supreme Court justices who would overturn the landmark case very much makes the subject of abortion a political issue.

Does that make the monument outside the St. Thomas the Apostle parish center polling site political in nature, if not in origin? Perhaps. The monument was paid for by the Knights of Columbus and the Diocese of Rochester, the latter of which owns the parish center.

Regardless, the monument doesn’t qualify as electioneering and won’t unless abortion, or possibly a Right-to-Life Party candidate, is on the ballot.

The Right-to-Life Party lost its official status in New York in 2002, when it fell short of the 50,000 votes in a gubernatorial election to remain on the ballot. Its last ballot icon was a fetus in utero.

“If the Right-to-Life Party was a recognized party in New York, and depending on what its party symbol was, we would have to take a closer look at this scenario,” said Doug French, the Republican-appointed elections commissioner in Monroe County.

It is one thing to regulate active politicking to sway voters at a polling site and quite another to regulate what voters wear as they walk inside or the convictions of certain institutions that host polling sites.

Whether religious institutions should be used as polling sites is another issue entirely. In an ideal world, there would be a strict separation of church and state on Election Day.

But churches have been designated as polling places for centuries due to their accommodating facilities and central locations.

For now, neither the polling site at St. Thomas the Apostle nor its monument to the unborn are going anywhere. Then again, neither is Corbin.